Relax enjoy the year end.

What? shock horror, did he say that?

Yes I did, now is a time to concentrate on family, customers, and staff. Now is a time to end the year on a good note. It is not the time to try and plan strategic goals and sales targets for next year. That should have been done last month, or better yet in the new year when those plans are a reality. If you try to do it now,  you are increasing your work load and will not truly be concentrating. You will make plans which have detail missing. Now is a good time to gather the reports you will need in January. You will make plans and then go off to enjoy Christmas, when you come back the plans will have faded and not seem quit so vital. This means that when you start the new year you will fall back into the pattern of dealing with the immediacy of the moment. Not actually working to your plan.

So wrap up what need to be done, spend time talking to clients and customers. Spend time with your staff. But most importantly take a break and spend time with friends and family.

You will find your self refreshed and full of ideas for new opportunities. Now is the time to sit down with you people and do some serious planning. Planning which will kick off the spirit of the year, planning which will be much more effective because you are concentrating on it. Set your goal of where you want to be next Christmas. Stick it up where every one can see it and create the plan to remind people and your self of the priorities. Plan in ways to avoid getting pulled into ruts and directions which don’t fit the plan. Review in an honest manner what were the good and bad points of the past year. What worked, what did not.

Break the planning into sessions over a day.

First: review, general discussion,

Second: lay down the outcomes for the planning, lead the discussion,

Third: make the plan,

Fourth, review, tidy and put it on the wall.

For the rest of the year, spend time once a week to review the plan and make sure you are keeping to it. But don’t be scared to change it if the situation needs it. But do be sure to understand and explain why you are making the change. Be sure it is a strategic change and not just a side alley.

So now that we have that all figured out,

Merry Christmas to all.

It has been a busy time of late, which is good, but it means I have not been able to write for Sun Live, which isn’t good. Still, I hope this post will make up for it.
Because so much of my work  involves  business use of the web I hear lots of different stories about peoples experiences. One area which generates a lot of passion is web-site creation.
It’s a sad but true fact that the web-site creation sector is like any other business sector: it has it’s good developers and its total cowboys, and like any other sector it has its great clients and its nightmare clients.
A few different web developers asked me to write a post about the bad habits of both parties, who they always seem to be cleaning up after.

One of the main issues I have identified is that too many clients seeking to have a web-site have a limited understanding of what needs to happen and just what is involved. On the flip side, I have noticed many web developers who are unwilling to spend the time to inform the client and give a solid understanding of the process at the beginning of the development. This has the result that two months into the development neither party understands what the other one wants to achieve.: a total breakdown in communication.The client feels that they are getting “ripped off” and the developer tends to put the work to one side in favour of  more agreeable work. This is where I get called in in order to bring the development to completion.

Web developers should be giving their clients at least an hour to fully come to grips with what they hope to achieve and then give them a brief proposal based on the main points. If the client agrees, the detail should go in the agreement. If the client values what the developer is doing they should not then devalue it by insisting on lots of free work before they sign up.
Some firms go further and have a client liaison person. Their job is to look after the client and keep the developer working. There are pros and cons to this approach. If this person is an integral part of the development team it will work. If not, it’s often another layer of confusion.

It is imperative for the client to know what is being done and when it will be delivered. One of the complaints I hear  from client’s is “it’s past the date they told me and  they wont give me a new date”. It’s not good enough. It would be bad practice in any sector. Set a date and get it agreed in writing. I heard a story from one person whose developer had spent 7 months on a 2 month project and then turned around and said the site was out of date, it did not cater to social media! On the flip side the client must provide information to  the developer in a timely manner. Developers should give reasonable time scales for work and not exaggerate the time it takes. But also Clients need to understand what is involved and understand that developing a web site is nothing like writing a document in word. What may seem like a simple change may on one page may require changes to a database and other pages. All of which takes time. I sometimes have to educate one while telling the other to be realistic, to not try to charge 20 hours for work which only requires 3!

A good web-site costs money, like all things of quality. If  a client’s main deciding factor is the price then the outcome will reflect that. Client’s often push and push for more “extras” for free or offer s their brother-in-law’’s graphic’s to keep prices down! This is often where it starts to go wrong for many projects.

If you are a client looking for a development firm, check their portfolio, contact past clients and ask them how the work went, was it on time and did they find the developer professional to work with.
Get prepared for the meeting. I have created a check list and included the link below. If the developer is on the same track great, if not run away. They have just wasted theirs and your time. By being prepared you show the developer you are not another potentially bad client with a brother-in-law in the family. That will go a long way to creating a good relationship.

You can find the check list here.

It is a great list below are a few items which jumped out at me,

• Simplify the problem relentlessly, and be prepared to accept an elegant solution that satisfies the simplest problem you can describe.Hire the right person. Don’t ask a mason to paint your house.
• Part of your job is to find someone who is already in the sweet spot you’re looking for, or someone who is eager and able to get there.
• Pay as much as you need to solve the problem, which might be more than you want to. If you pay less than that, you’ll end up wasting all your money. Why would a great innovator work cheap?
• Cede all issues of irrelevant personal taste to the innovator. I don’t care if you hate the curves on the new logo. Just because you write the check doesn’t mean your personal aesthetic sense is relevant.

That last one is great, don’t tell the person you hire how to do the job you hired them for.

But you should read the full list over at Seth’s

At the party someone stated “journalists may be redundant”. My reply was that as gatherer’s on information they are, but as analysts of information, they are in more demand than ever. It is okay having all this data but, someone needs to make sense of it.

This took me back to a subject which has been on my mind of late. The nature of the content on the web. Can it be trusted and how can business know the validity of the facts on which it is basing its decisions? You see there is a method to research which academics, journalists and “researchers” should use. They should record and verify the sources of the facts they are placing in their content. There is a huge swathe of content (like this statement) which has no factual backing and no references against which it can be checked. I cannot give you a reference or source here because I can find no study on the issue. Its based on observation and may be flawed. But I don’t think so.

Take for example slideshare.com. They provide a great resource, an easy to use method for sharing power points. You go to a conference and the presenter can make his power point freely accessible to all to re watch later. But how many of those power points contain references. I looked at 20 the other day on a particular sensitive subject and only one had any form of reference. Yet people are using these as sources. But they may be the emperors new content. Without substance, without research or references to research, to back them up. Or notice that they are opinion. They may well be created using sources which where created using sources which had no factual basis at all. Yet it is regurgitated and used by the misinformed or the under-pressure  and may well be presented as facts upon which business and political decisions are made.

There is an old adage, “if it is in the paper it must be true”. It seems that this has now become “if its on the web……”

This is one of the things I really likes about Pingar, it produced a report based on the search request using contextual matching. But it also then gave all its sources and with the click of a link would pull the data in to supply me with the deeper perspective as needed. Being built from an academic research perspective, it needs to prove the veracity of the data it is supplying. I am not totally sure how this will work in the web as opposed to an intranet. But then maybe this is actually the tool for the deep web. Finding the real source rather than the conversations about it. Or it may cause a change in the way results are supported with others providing better meta data to support the authenticity of what they are supplying.

That can only be a good thing.

Don’t go back to sleep. And if you do don’t blame me!

But there is a problem which we need to deal with. Its called institutionalized bad habits. It begins when we are sat in a class room with 30 noisy peers and expected to concentrate on boring work while the other people sat at our desk want to talk about last nights TV program. We are not able nor trained to filter that and concentrate. Later as adults we realize all too late that we have a bad habit. We are pulled this way and that, reacting to new information and demands for our attention. There are some disciplines which require this ability. The military for instance. But they spend a lot of time and effort teaching their people how to absorb, analyze and then prioritize. It does not always work so they build systems to deal with it within the chain of command. This is not always possible in civilian organizations, especially small ones where individuals have a wide range of tasks to do.

Prior to the computer it was much easier, the pace of distraction was more limited. But now we have so many means of communication that we are constantly being tapped on the shoulder. Interestingly it is producers of some writting software who have identified this first. Some word processors now have a feature to hide the rest of your desktop. Other apps should follow suite. Working in a browser has become more and more common as more apps we use live in the cloud. Yet it can be our wost enemy as far as time management goes. Firefox created Prism which allows you to create a local instance of a web app. Its greatest feature is that it removes you from the browser and the distraction it affords.

People thought for a long time that gen Y was cool because they can multitask. Yes maybe they can or maybe they are just distracted. Multitasking is a myth. You only do something well when you are concentrating on it. Its called focus. Its essential to create true value and results. So decide when you are available to new information and when you need make time to focus. Turn off the incoming stream and put a sign on the door.

DO NOT DISTURB…..WORKING

I see a glitch, user names and email addresses are often very different. My twitter name is not the same as my Google account name and my business email is not @gmail.com. As a freelancer I work under other email addresses as well, reflecting the branding of the client.

So the picture which Google social search is going to create is not going to have me at its true center. It is more likely going to look like a Venn_diagram . Now this may turn out to be very valuable in the long run as the connections who reside within the overlap are possibly identified as the most meaningful. But how will they get their if you are not logged in to a specific Google account at the time?

It will be interesting to see if it works in practice and proves to be more than a gimick to get us all building our Google profiles. Which is the only way it is really going to work, with Google as the center of our online lives.

Take shaving, its a fairly simple repetitive task. At its simplest you need some lubricant (not soap) and a sharp edge. But we can improve on that, we have lubricant which really lubricates and at the same time makes your face come alive in the morning. Why stop at one blade? Have two and lubricant. No wait better yet have 3, no 4! that’s it…. for now.

Now  I have tried many variations of the ingredients for a good shave. The old Wilkinson sword classic, Gillette all sorts and lastly a 4 blade thing from Schick. I have tried foam, gell, King shave and water.  I have found that gell clogs the razors especially when you get to 4 blades. I have found that for me three blades with foam works best. I have used that combination for a few years. Then a recently tried a 4 blade razor. It seems that three blades is just right, there is enough space between the blades for the water to wash the hair out. I have thick course hair. But four just clogged up and reduced my shave experience. So now I am back at three.

The shaving companies need to convince us that “they” hold the new secret to the perfect shave. “The best yet” the “improved”. They have to do this as like most producers they are in a tug of war for our pennies. But this means that sometimes the designers come up with things which seem like a good idea and worked well in their lab. But does not work so well in practice. But hey they sold loads anyway.  Sometimes they will add something just because they can. Instead of saying we really have made this the best there is at doing this job, lets hold it up as an example and find something else to make money. More honest, and more useful.

Business tools are a bit like this. We are attracted to the new shiny software, the one which does it all. then we try to make it fir into our process. Rather than finding out what our process is and then looking for a tool which fits it. And looking for the simplest one which will require the easiest maintenance and is totally designed for just that job. A good engineer has the right size spanner for the job not a monkey wrench.

But it takes time to find those tools, which is why its always worth talking to someone who spends their time doing just that. Sit with them and work out what your process is. Then send them off to source the best tool for the job. Try it out implement it and get on with business. Or realize that you are already using the best tool and stay with it. If your consultant is loyal to you and not his commission he will tell you you have the best tool already.

So give you mind a rest, take a break, a real break and have a good think. Your mind and your family will thank you.